Executives from CKAN, GovDelivery's NuCivic, Junar and Socrata each highlighted convergences and differentiators among competitors in the open data industry. But all agreed the sector is growing and maturing, and the technology that underpins the presentation of data is becoming more user friendly and sophisticated.
Today’s open data platforms are more capable of telling stories with data and spurring engagement with constituents, the participants said. It’s not sufficient anymore to post only static lists of data sets and spreadsheets.
“I think the whole community now … is recognizing the need for a shift, and I think you’re already starting to see that as other platforms are shifting to this [user-centric] direction in meaningful ways, said Sid Burgess, a senior open data consultant for GovDelivery. Burgess said his company’s approach when building an open data website is to fulfill “user stories” similar to the methodology used in agile development.
Diego May, co-founder of Junar, echoed the same theme, saying open data should help government become more efficient. Junar’s clients include Sacramento County, and the cities of Anaheim, Pasadena and Sacramento.
“One thing I want to convey is we are doing this because we are very passionate about this industry. We’ve seen the cases where coming from a government that wasn’t too open, then they open up data, they generate a lot of communication around that, they engage with communities, then they can really have an impact on how people see government,” May said.
The companies’ representatives conceded that their offerings do share similarities. The platforms typically are offered either on premise, as Software as a Service or in the cloud. Most now have built-in data visualization capabilities and templates so that government staff can present data alongside embedded text, photos and videos. The platforms also include an Application Programming Interface (API). In some cases, the back end is different; for example, NuCivic's offering is built on Drupal while Junar uses Java OpenStack.
All of them, though, may be chasing Seattle-based Socrata, which is backed by more than $50 million in venture capital and is being used by 16 agencies in California and 30 states overall, hundreds of cities and the White House, said Socrata CEO Kevin Merritt, a native of Roseville, Calif.
“We’ve got a super easy-to-use, drag-and-drop story composition editor. We call it Perspectives. We find that government employees who think that they are the subject matter experts of their data, want to narrate what it’s about. … We think telling stories is important, so we have a tool for people to do that.”
Socrata is the platform the Government Operations Agency is using in a pilot of a prototype for a statewide open data portal that would publish new data sets and harvest data sets from existing transparency portals operated by state agencies and departments on their own.
Stuart Drown, GovOps deputy secretary for Innovation and Accountability, reiterated Monday that the open data portal pilot is starting out as a modest effort that’s designed to be low cost using existing resources. Participating departments have been asked to submit three to five data sets that are already collected, Drown said.
4 out of 4 open data platforms agree, we've got so much work to do. Cc/ @CAGovOps #opendata — Sid Burgess (@sidburgess) March 1, 2016
